


that summer when the sun didn’t shine

by prettydizzeed



Category: Shadowhunters (TV), The Shadowhunter Chronicles - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe, Demon Hunters, Gen, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, No Sex, Religious Imagery & Symbolism, Southern Gothic, conversion therapy, religious trauma, sorta - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-30
Updated: 2020-12-30
Packaged: 2021-03-11 02:14:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,307
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28427619
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/prettydizzeed/pseuds/prettydizzeed
Summary: If your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off, and Alec has had a knife in his belt since thirteen, but he’s never acted on any of it. Never touched anybody. So maybe that’s why this whole thing used to involve a lobotomy.
Relationships: Magnus Bane & Alec Lightwood, Magnus Bane/Alec Lightwood
Comments: 3
Kudos: 17





	that summer when the sun didn’t shine

**Author's Note:**

> please heed the tags and don’t read this one if it may distress you! heads up for descriptions of blood/minor gore, minor injuries, general creepy vibes, and a whole lot of desecration of Christian symbols. feel free to hmu in the comments or on tumblr @campgender if you’d like more specific warnings!
> 
> title from Promiseland by MIKA

Nothing noteworthy was supposed to happen tonight. Alec is just here for another appointment with the nice, grandmotherly woman his parents have been paying to remind him how unless he changes some things real quick, he’s going to hell. He’ll walk into the third classroom on the right in his father’s church, he’ll sit down and struggle to get comfortable on the plush couch, he’ll have words he’s never wanted another human being to hear dragged out of him one by one, like pulling his fingernails out. Then she’ll put her small, soft hand on his, and he’ll leave feeling like someone reached into his skull and rotated his brain ninety degrees. No big deal. 

If your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off, and he’s had a knife in his belt since thirteen, but he’s never acted on any of it. Never touched anybody. So maybe that’s why this whole thing used to involve a lobotomy. 

The lines in the parking lot are faded to just the memory of a smudge. Alec pulls up to the concrete divider at the corner of the sun-worn playground and a generic tree and cuts the engine. He and Jace used to chase each other around out here, sand clinging to the cuffs of their jeans.

He crosses the parking lot. The only light is the one at the steeple; it casts his shadow long and skewed as he pockets his car keys and opens the heavy door.

The counselor isn’t in their usual classroom. When Alec flicks the light switch, nothing happens. 

Okay. So he’ll just wait for her in the sanctuary, figure out what room to meet in once she gets there. Pray, maybe, beg for a salvation he’s starting to doubt he’ll ever receive.

The overhead lights in the sanctuary won’t come on, either, and Alec would think there’d been a power outage if it weren’t for the border of light around the cross on the wall behind the altar, tinged red out the corner of his eye. 

He blinks.

Unconsciously, Alec walks toward it, absent-mindedly brushing his fingers over the armrests of the pews as he goes. The wood is hot to the touch. He can hear sounds coming from the choir loft now, a high-pitched note that sounds like a scream. Wax drips down the empty candle holders. Alec’s chest feels tight. And the red light keeps glowing brighter and brighter, creating behind him a shadow, forcing him to squint, overpowering the cross.

He feels like he’s going to be sick, all the conflict that’s been building within him over the past several months blaring itself headline-bright behind his eyes. The back of his throat vibrates with an unvoiced cry, and his knees threaten to give out, but he suddenly feels that to fall upon the worn blue cushion and clasp his hands atop the wooden rail would be to enter a position from which he would never emerge. He pinches the bridge of his nose, which does nothing to dull what feels like ten migraines fighting for jurisdiction of his brain.

He thought he was possessed by a demon, once, at age nine when he had his first panic attack. He’s never told the counselor about that. And now, stripped raw by so many long weeks of accusations, body revolting against this holy place all at once, in too much pain to outdefine his terror with rationality, he wonders—

There’s a sound at the door to the narthex, and Alec spins around, immediately regretting it but unable to move his feet or twist his head to face what he’s turned his back on. Behind him, something in the altar rattles, straining the locks. Alec can’t breathe.

And Magnus Bane is striding down the center aisle, headed for the altar, back straight and shoulders set and nails painted. He walks right up to Alec, speaking softly but firmly, like to a pained and wailing animal, scared enough to bite. He doesn’t touch Alec, but he has a certain set to his hands, paused halfway through reaching out, that makes it seem like it’s because he doesn’t want to make Alec uncomfortable, not because he’s afraid to. “It’s okay, Alexander,” he says, and Alec wonders if this is how people felt when Jesus told them  _ Peace be with you.  _

Magnus doesn’t look behind Alec at all, focusing on his eyes the whole time, but Alec can feel something building, lighting up every cell in his sympathetic nervous system. “It’s going to be okay. What do you want to do?”

Somewhere in Alec’s chest, in the joints of his fingers, is the flash of an image of him holding Magnus to his chest, just breathing together until Alec’s own heartbeat dips down to a level that isn’t dangerous anymore. It fragments and deforms, though, like a rock thrown through a stained glass window, before he can actually think it. 

“I want—I want to do what’s right,” he says, and Magnus’s face ripples, a brief flash of a grief so deep Alec doesn’t know how to name it that then sinks back beneath the smooth features of Magnus’s calm expression.

“I know, Alexander,” he says, and it isn’t pity there, in his voice, but it’s something soft and complicated. “But you have to decide if you’d rather live.”

Suddenly, all the church bells start ringing at once, clamoring like the emergency in Alec’s chest. He bends at the waist beneath the force of it, feet too stuck for him to fully stumble, all of his senses overcome.

Magnus presses a ring into Alec’s left palm. “You want to save your soul?” he asks, and he hasn’t raised his voice at all, but somehow Alec can still hear him clearly. “You’ve got to save your body first. Worry about the rest later.”

He holds a hand out, and Alec can’t stop his right hand from reaching out and taking it. And then they run.

*

Magnus takes him to a Waffle House.

“Territory of the graveyard shift workers and the theater kids,” he says, spreading his arms, and Alec thinks that can’t be right, but when he checks his phone, it’s just past 6 AM. He’d pulled into the church parking lot at half past eight yesterday evening—at least, he hopes it was yesterday.

They get a corner booth, and Alec tries not to stare. Tries not to ask.

Magnus orders them both a black coffee. “More for the warmth than anything,” he says, leaning forward, smiling at Alec like he’s sharing a secret. Alec cups his hands around the mug and hopes that’ll keep them from shaking.

“How are you feeling?” Magnus asks. Alec shakes his head. 

“I don't know.” Magnus nods, but he doesn’t look disappointed in that answer, which is more of a relief than it should be. “I… Thank you,” Alec says, looking at the table. “For… for whatever that was.”

“I would say any time, but I’d prefer not to repeat the circumstances if it’s all the same to you,” Magnus says, his light tone and easy smile at odds with the dark circles that are rapidly gathering under his eyes.

“Yeah,” Alec agrees slowly. He swallows hard. “I should probably get back—I’m sure Izzy and Jace are freaking out, my parents—” His phone, when he pulls it out of his pocket, is fried. He was going to ask Magnus to take him back to the church, much as the thought makes his skin crawl, but he’s no longer confident that his car would start, or that the backseat would be empty if it did.

“Alexander,” Magnus says, kind but firm, “Let me buy you some breakfast,” and Alec lets out a long breath between his teeth and nods. 

“So, what’s the deal,” Alec asks later over a plate of waffles (no syrup, but he did add extra butter, if only to ease the furrow between Magnus’s brows). “Are you some kind of,” he waves his fork, grasping for words, “atheist exorcist?” 

It still feels like something he’d imagine in a dream, Magnus Bane appearing mid-nightmare and delivering him from the impending evil breathing against his spine, angel and nightlight and friend wrapped into one. He knows some folks who genuinely think someone like Magnus would get struck dead the second he set foot on holy ground.

“No, I believe in the divine,” Magnus says, and his smile is heavy, weighed down by more years than he’s lived. Alec makes an inquiring noise at his failure to deny the second half of that description. Magnus sighs, reaches a hand to the wilting spikes of his hair before seeming to think better of it. His eyes makeup is streaked into the hollows under his eyes, blending together with the bruises. “I don’t  _ expel  _ anything so much as help people recognize how to cut off the footholds before it can take root.” 

“It?” Alec asks, and Magnus pulls his phone out of his pocket. For some reason, his still works. He taps a few times and slides it across the table to Alec, who looks down to see a photo of the pool where his father had baptized a young couple last summer, its water now a deep red. Alec would ask if it’s some sort of prank, but—he can feel something, between the pixels of the photograph and in the lines around Magnus’s mouth, that tells him it isn’t. 

“You can scroll, if you want,” Magnus offers. When he gestures, Alec notices that the nail polish on his index finger is chipped; for some reason, it makes him sad. “It doesn’t get much better, though.”

Alec scrolls, feeling his jaw tighten with each image. All of a house burned to ash except a Bible. A fishing pond crusted over like a scab. Steeple after steeple culminating in a gun instead of a cross. 

There’s a short video, shaky and unfocused, of someone walking through a church door. The second the sanctuary lights hit them, they’re a dead man walking, skeletal in their Sunday best. 

“I call it the Adversary,” Magnus says. “A little tongue-in-cheek, I admit, but I believe it’s important to take the little joys where one can.”

“These are all here?”

Magnus nods. “The general area, yes. Though there are similar occurrences in other locations—it took ages to vet some of the forum posts, but they seem legit. I have no idea if it’s all caused by the same thing or not, but signs point to that option not being out of the question.”

Alec pushes his plate back, feeling sick. “And—this thing was in my dad’s church?”

“Alec,” Magnus says gently, setting his hand on the table near but not quite on Alec’s wrist, “this thing was in  _ you. _ ”

Alec can’t regulate his reaction, can’t dial back the instinctive recoil, the way his fingers curl into his palms and his pulse jumps and every hair on his body stands at a right angle to his skin.  _ “What?” _

Magnus doesn’t try to placate him, which is an unexpected relief. “It’s… internally generated, for lack of a better term. Finding resonance in the surrounding environment, manipulating matter, that comes later. The horror doesn’t get made elsewhere and then crawl inside us; we’re taught, or forced, to make it ourselves.” 

“You… you had this in you, too? Or something similar?”

Magnus picks up his phone and inputs a second password, then turns it so Alec can see the screen. There’s—a lot of blood. A fire, in a perfect circle, stretching its arms towards the camera—towards Magnus—with a hunger that makes Alec check the exits. Somehow, through the screen, the smell of smoke. 

Something on Alec’s hand stings; he looks down at it, and there’s a scratch from his wrist to the tip of his middle finger. When he passes Magnus his phone, he leaves a bloody fingerprint on the case. 

“How do we fight it?” Alec asks, the question he’s wondered since the first night the floorboards wouldn’t stop creaking long after he got up off his knees. But Magnus shakes his head.

“You don’t. Or at least—not now. What I do, it’s not a role that can be filled without sacrifice. It—it takes something from you, to stare this kind of thing in the eye. It wants to devour, to plant a whirlpool in the pit of your stomach and drag your heart down so deep you’ll need years to find it again. You—you’ve got to live first, Alexander. To take deep breaths of the world until you’re no longer a gaping wound. Then, when the time is right, if you so choose, you’ll come back, and you’ll carry on the work.” Alec can tell from how he says it, though, that he doesn’t expect him to return, to opt in to the same path he did.

“But—”

Magnus smiles, sorrowful and gentle. “Sometimes, Alexander, the best thing you can do for the world is stay in it.”

*

Alec is still wearing Magnus’s ring. It’s got two layers, an inner one that’s light and an outer one that’s dark, with shapes cut out in the phases of the moon; he catches himself twisting it to reflect every change in the sky. When the outer circle has made fifty-eight and some change trips around its center, Alec shoulders a black duffel bag and boards a train bound for a town where a car sits rusting in a church parking lot, suspended midway between landmark and omen, where there’s a house a few streets down that looks like a place where he could’ve been loved, maybe, if he’d managed to commit autophagy on the  _ Imago Dei.  _

There’s a man there who saved his life, once. He figures it’s time he returns the favor. 

**Author's Note:**

> sometimes you write a heavy-handed fic to Cope lol


End file.
